Search this Site

A Few Scenes from Mojave Spaceport

By Doug Jones

I like to describe Mojave as a truckstop town with a really cool airport. In the last year, that’s changed to a really cool spaceport, which the local weekly paper is sure to mention in almost every issue. Because the diner at the air, no, spaceport administration building, the Voyager Restaurant has a beer and wine license, locals sometimes point out that it’s the world’s first spaceport bar (12 hours, bottle to throttle, of course). It’s a fun place for breakfast, where I can chat with various prop, jet, and rocket pilots; retired spacecraft designers (X-15 and lifting bodies); and even one brave soul who worked on fluorine-deuterium rocket engines for high power lasers! Photos and memorabilia line the walls, speakers at each booth monitor the Unicom radio, and the picture windows (occasionally rattled by sonic booms) sometimes show the most unique aircraft in the world taxiing or flying by. It’s fun to see visitors go into “cool aviation stuff” overload, especially when they see celebrity regulars such as Dick Rutan. For me it’s just the local diner where I flirt with the waitresses who get my order started before even I sit down. There are some benefits to living in a small town.

A typically untypical morning at the Mojave Spaceport. Photo by Odyssey staff.

One gets accustomed to the sounds and sights of airliners coming and going, but the roar of an afterburner or the buzz of an aerobatic plane’s prop still causes lots of “prairie dogging” as engineers and techs leap up to peer out the windows. A series of flybys by a visiting F-117, U-2 or F-18 in NASA colors can ratchet that up to groups of spectators gathered outside each hangar up and down the flight line. When a lovingly restored P-51 or P-40 or tri-tailed Constellation taxis in with that glorious piston engine throb and ties down, people find excuses to drift over for a look. A test pilot retiring from a neighboring company was recently given a half hour of free time in a jet fighter in lieu of a gold watch, and we all turned out to enjoy the impromptu airshow.

There’s a mixed cast of space and rocket companies on the grounds, including Orbital Sciences’ Stargazer L-1011 carrier aircraft for the Pegasus orbital launcher, Scaled Composite’s famed White Knight-SpaceShip One combination, XCOR’s own EZ-Rocket flight demonstrator, and test facilities for several DARPA projects. In total nine companies involved in space flight and rocket propulsion have facilities in Mojave or on the airport.

Various movie and TV productions use runways for high speed runs, or a taxiway to blow up buses, airplanes, and whatnot. Audio technicians recorded the sound of a recent engine test for the upcoming science fiction movie, Serenity. The most ironic instance might be the set for Waterworld filmed seaborne footage—in a huge tank on a ramp at this desert airfield. Loud noises and fireballs often go unnoticed by airport tenants. Some of them I wish I had noticed! The happy maniacs from the TV show Mythbusters once blasted the top off of an old airliner while exploring the James Bond shooting out an airplane window myth.

When XCOR rolls out a rocket vehicle or test stand onto the ramp and starts doing engine runs, routine utility traffic along the flight line tends to increase. New large engines are first tested out at a bunker on the far side of the airfield. On the other hand, routine operations and crew training runs of the EZ-Rocket are performed right on the flight line. We once terrified an ejection seat technician who was head-down in the cockpit of an F-4. He hadn’t heard our warning horn before an engine test. Whoops, sorry! It seems the Martin-Baker seats on that particular model have a solid rocket motor the burns for a couple of seconds, and our “magneto check” test runs sounded terribly similar…

Most days are not so thrilling, although my days are always different and challenging. Even though I’ve designed and tested many engines, seen thousands of runs and dozens of manned rocket flights, I’m glad it still seems a bit surreal to routinely go out to the shop to do a demonstration run on the teacart rocket engine for a visiting VIP, and casually note the flag waving in the breeze kicked up by the exhaust. This is after verifying the “hangar cat safely locked in office” checklist item to prevent panicking her. Almost anything, no matter how outré, can become routine if you do it often enough over a long enough period of time. I hope to make manned spaceflight fall in that category some day soon.